NPM Malware | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A malicious package uploaded to the npm registry has been found deploying a sophisticated remote access trojan on compromised Windows machines. The package, named " oscompatible ," was published on January 9, 2024, attracting a total of 380 downloads before it was taken down. oscompatible included a "few strange binaries," according to software supply chain security firm Phylum, including a single executable file, a dynamic-link library (DLL) and an encrypted DAT file, alongside a JavaScript file. This JavaScript file ("index.js") executes an "autorun.bat" batch script but only after running a compatibility check to determine if the target machine runs on Microsoft Windows. If the platform is not Windows, it displays an error message to the user, stating the script is running on Linux or an unrecognized operating system, urging them to run it on "Windows Server OS." The batch script, for its part, verifies if it has admin privil

Nearly three dozen counterfeit packages have been discovered in the npm package repository that are designed to exfiltrate sensitive data from developer systems, according to findings from Fortinet FortiGuard Labs. One set of packages – named @expue/webpack, @expue/core, @expue/vue3-renderer, @fixedwidthtable/fixedwidthtable, and @virtualsearchtable/virtualsearchtable – harbored an obfuscated JavaScript file that's capable of gathering valuable secrets. This includes Kubernetes configurations, SSH keys, and system metadata such as username, IP address, and hostname. The cybersecurity firm said it also discovered another collection of four modules, i.e., binarium-crm, career-service-client-0.1.6, hh-dep-monitoring, and orbitplate, which results in the unauthorized extraction of source code and configuration files. "The targeted files and directories may contain highly valuable intellectual property and sensitive information, such as various application and service credent

Identities now transcend human boundaries. Within each line of code and every API call lies a non-human identity. These entities act as programmatic access keys, enabling authentication and facilitating interactions among systems and services, which are essential for every API call, database query, or storage account access. As we depend on multi-factor authentication and passwords to safeguard human identities, a pressing question arises: How do we guarantee the security and integrity of these non-human counterparts? How do we authenticate, authorize, and regulate access for entities devoid of life but crucial for the functioning of critical systems? Let's break it down. The challenge Imagine a cloud-native application as a bustling metropolis of tiny neighborhoods known as microservices, all neatly packed into containers. These microservices function akin to diligent worker bees, each diligently performing its designated task, be it processing data, verifying credentials, or

An unknown threat actor is leveraging malicious npm packages to target developers with an aim to steal source code and configuration files from victim machines, a sign of how threats lurk consistently in open-source repositories. "The threat actor behind this campaign has been linked to malicious activity dating back to 2021," software supply chain security firm Checkmarx  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. "Since then, they have continuously published malicious packages." The latest report is a continuation of the  same campaign  that Phylum disclosed at the start of the month in which a number of npm modules were engineered to exfiltrate valuable information to a remote server. The packages, by design, are configured to execute immediately post-installation by means of a postinstall hook defined in the package.json file. It triggers the launch of preinstall.js, which spawns index.js to capture the system metadata as well as harvest source code and

More than a dozen malicious packages have been discovered on the npm package repository since the start of August 2023 with capabilities to deploy an open-source information stealer called  Luna Token Grabber  on systems belonging to Roblox developers. The ongoing campaign, first detected on August 1 by ReversingLabs, employs modules that masquerade as the legitimate package  noblox.js , an API wrapper that's used to create scripts that interact with the Roblox gaming platform. The software supply chain security company described the activity as a "replay of an attack  uncovered  two years ago" in October 2021. "The malicious packages [...] reproduce code from the legitimate noblox.js package but add malicious, information-stealing functions," software threat researcher Lucija Valentić  said  in a Tuesday analysis. The packages were cumulatively downloaded 963 times before they were taken down. The names of the rogue packages are as follows - noblox.js-v

NuGet, PyPi, and npm ecosystems are the target of a new campaign that has resulted in over 144,000 packages being published by unknown threat actors. "The packages were part of a new attack vector, with attackers spamming the open source ecosystem with packages containing links to phishing campaigns," researchers from Checkmarx and Illustria  said  in a report published Wednesday. Of the  144,294 phishing-related packages  that were detected, 136,258 were published on NuGet, 7,824 on PyPi, and 212 on npm. The offending libraries have since been unlisted or taken down. Further analysis has revealed that the whole process was automated and that the packages were pushed over a short span of time, with a majority of the usernames following the convention "<a-z><1900-2022>." The fake packages themselves claimed to provide hacks, cheats, and free resources in an attempt to trick users into downloading them. The URLs to the rogue phishing pages were embed

Multiple campaigns that distributed trojanized and typosquatted packages on the NPM open source repository have been identified as the work of a single threat actor dubbed LofyGang . Checkmarx said it discovered 199 rogue packages totaling thousands of installations, with the group operating for over a year with the goal of stealing credit card data as well as user accounts associated with Discord Nitro, gaming, and streaming services. "LofyGang operators are seen promoting their hacking tools in hacking forums, while some of the tools are shipped with a hidden backdoor," the software security company said in a report shared with The Hacker News prior to its publication. Various pieces of the attack puzzle have already been reported by  JFrog ,  Sonatype , and  Kaspersky  (which called it LofyLife), but the latest analysis pulls the various operations together under one organizational umbrella that Checkmarx is referring to as  LofyGang . Believed to be an organized c

A malicious NPM package has been found masquerading as the legitimate software library for Material Tailwind, once again indicating attempts on the part of threat actors to distribute malicious code in open source software repositories. Material Tailwind is a  CSS-based framework  advertised by its maintainers as an "easy to use components library for Tailwind CSS and Material Design." "The malicious Material Tailwind npm package, while posing as a helpful development tool, has an automatic post-install script," Karlo Zanki, security researcher at ReversingLabs,  said  in a report shared with The Hacker News. This script is engineered to download a password-protected ZIP archive file that contains a Windows executable capable of running PowerShell scripts. The now-removed rogue package, named  material-tailwindcss , has been downloaded 320 times to date, all of which occurred on or after September 15, 2022. In a tactic that's becoming increasingly common,

A new large scale supply chain attack has been observed targeting Azure developers with no less than 218 malicious NPM packages with the goal of stealing personal identifiable information. "After manually inspecting some of these packages, it became apparent that this was a targeted attack against the entire  @azure NPM scope , by an attacker that employed an automatic script to create accounts and upload malicious packages that cover the entirety of that scope," JFrog researchers Andrey Polkovnychenko and Shachar Menashe  said  in a new report. The entire set of malicious packages was disclosed to the NPM maintainers roughly two days after they were published earlier this week, leading to their quick removal, but not before each of the packages were downloaded around 50 times on average. The attack refers to what's called typosquatting, which takes place when bad actors push rogue packages with names mimicking legitimate libraries to a public software registry such

Another batch of 25 malicious JavaScript libraries have made their way to the official NPM package registry with the goal of stealing Discord tokens and environment variables from compromised systems, more than two months after  17 similar packages  were taken down. The libraries in question leveraged typosquatting techniques and masqueraded as other legitimate packages such as colors.js, crypto-js, discord.js, marked, and  noblox.js , DevOps security firm JFrog said, attributing the packages as the work of "novice malware authors." The complete list of packages is below – node-colors-sync (Discord token stealer) color-self (Discord token stealer) color-self-2 (Discord token stealer) wafer-text (Environment variable stealer) wafer-countdown (Environment variable stealer) wafer-template (Environment variable stealer) wafer-darla (Environment variable stealer) lemaaa (Discord token stealer) adv-discord-utility (Discord token stealer) tools-for-discord (Discord t

Three JavaScript libraries uploaded to the official NPM package repository have been unmasked as crypto-mining malware, once again demonstrating how open-source software package repositories are becoming a lucrative target for executing an array of attacks on Windows, macOS, and Linux systems. The malicious packages in question — named  okhsa ,  klow , and  klown  — were published by the same developer and falsely claimed to be JavaScript-based user-agent string parsers designed to extract hardware specifics from the " User-Agent " HTTP header. But unbeknownst to the victims who imported them, the author hid cryptocurrency mining malware inside the libraries. The bad actor's NPM account has since been deactivated, and all the three libraries, each of which were downloaded 112, 4, and 65 times respectively, have been removed from the repository as of October 15, 2021. Attacks involving the three libraries worked by detecting the current operating system, before procee